Pushing for IoT standards

Despite having the rather inelegant name of `Internet of Things’ (IoT), the possibilities that present themselves through the ability to connect `anything and everything’ literally are only limited by the imagination of people to connect them together.

And, as a recent survey indicates, the people who can best exploit such capabilities are seriously thinking about those possibilities.

At the same time, however, actually making much of this possible is, in the end, going to depend on boring, technical subjects such as the development and implementation of connectivity standards to which all players in the IoT game can agree. Here, groups of like-minded technology companies are starting to coalesce with a view to building those standards.

One company, the UK’s key chip designer, ARM Holdings, is playing an increasing role. It is ARM, for example, that has conducted the survey, which has found that 75 percent of global business leaders are exploring the economic opportunities created by IoT. What is more, 96 percent of them expect their business to be using IoT in some respect by 2016.

The survey, `The Internet of Things Business Index: A quiet revolution gathers pace’, was undertaken fort the company by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The report, sponsored by ARM, found that 75 percent of C-suite business leaders are actively researching opportunities created by the Internet of Things (IoT). It shows that 30 percent of them feel that IoT will unlock new revenue opportunities, while 29 percent believe it will inspire new working practices, and 23 percent feel it will eventually changing the model of how they operate. The report concludes that the implementation of common standards will be paramount to enable communication between millions of connected devices and stop the ‘Internet of Silos’.

ARM’s interest in this is that processor chips using its designs and architecture are not only at the heart of most of the smartphones and tablet devices in everyday use, but also at the heart of the embedded control and monitoring systems that will help make IoT a reality.

Its technologies provide the functional building blocks in a huge range of products including cars, heart monitoring systems, washing machines and lighting. It also targets energy efficiency and miniaturisation and, as an example of what is now possible, has available the Cortex-M0+ processor, which fits within the width of the average human hair.

The report also highlights the need for a collaborative approach with companies needing to ‘learn to cooperate with players across industries’, encouraging standards that will avoid the so-called ‘Internet of Silos’ where data is created, but not shared amongst service providers to benefit the user. The report cites the current immaturity of industry standards as a major current barrier to the exploitation of IoT.

There is, therefore, a growing requirement for a common, open and secure IoT service delivery infrastructure that stretches from the cloud to the network’s edge. In a serious attempt to kick-off its creation, ARM has joined forces with chip maker, Freescale Semiconductor, and database and business applications behemoth, Oracle, though the latter’s connection comes more from its ownership of Java.

The goal is to bring together a growing, collaborative portfolio of segment solutions for next-generation IoT service providers and edge node developers.

“The Internet of Things is an exciting opportunity that will only be fully realized if we can create an open, cross-industry platform to help customers decrease time to market, manage costs and securely deliver new capabilities for embedded devices”

Working with ARM and Oracle, Freescale has established a secured, `one box’ service platform that will help standardise and consolidate the delivery and management of IoT services for a range of vertical markets. This combines end-to-end software with converged hierarchical smart gateways to establish a common, open framework for secured IoT services.

For example, the one box platform will now support the smart grid and telehealth IoT service markets, with the latter being suitable for both clinical and home-based deployments. Among other benefits, it is designed to help IoT service providers meet the certification requirements of the ContinuaHealth Alliance.

Freescale’s one box platform can consolidate boxes from multiple IoT service providers into a single, unified appliance. Based the company’s Kinetis microcontrollers, i.MX applications processors or QorIQ communications processors, it runs Oracle’s Java software and incorporates ARM’s Sensinode software, which securely connects large numbers of low-power edge node devices using standards-based technologies such as 6LoWPAN, CoAP and OMA Lightweight M2M.

These Freescale, ARM and Oracle technologies work together to provide a secure, end-to-end IoT gateway platform that speeds and simplifies the deployment of a vast array of innovative IoT services.

In addition to evolving IoT gateways, Freescale, ARM and Oracle are also working to streamline the development of new IoT edge node products under the ARM mbed project. The companies plan to evolve the native hardware abstraction layer (HAL) ARM mbed provides so that Oracle Java ME Embedded software can run seamlessly on ARM-based Freescale Kinetis microcontrollers. This should establish a significant expansion of processing platform choices and end-product form factors.